


Skin and Bone

by sass_bot



Category: The Wayhaven Chronicles (Interactive Fiction)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, F/F, Heavy Angst, Idiots in Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-22
Updated: 2020-09-22
Packaged: 2021-03-07 22:26:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,716
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26605198
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sass_bot/pseuds/sass_bot
Summary: Ava's lonely in her fortress, with only guilt and regrets to keep her company. All Naz wants is to be let in, instead of standing out in the cold on her own.
Relationships: Female Detective/Ava du Mortain
Comments: 15
Kudos: 37





	Skin and Bone

**Author's Note:**

> It's 2 am. I barely proofread this. I give it to you as is.  
> Good luck.

“Hey, Ava?” she says, warmth radiating from the smile that she wears so effortlessly on her freckled face. She stops right before the warehouse gate that Ava had been escorting her to.

Naz looks like an orange sky over a cotton candy pink carnival – an ocean wave peppering kisses over the shore. And when she speaks, it’s like a tune waltzing gently across piano keys; and Ava just knows that if Debussy or Chopin could hear what she hears, they would weep. Some days, all it takes to make Ava’s chest restrict is the sound of her own name whistled like a song through those peony blossom lips.

“I was thinking maybe… It would be fun if…” She hesitates and Ava quirks her eyebrow in response, allowing her to pick up her metaphorical cue cards and continue speaking. “Do you wanna come home with me? We could watch a movie? And eat popcorn?” With each sentence, her voice gets higher and higher. Her hazel eyes brimming with uncertainty as they search Ava’s face.

_Yes. Yes! One hundred times – Yes!_

It is then that Ava remembers to tug on the parachute ripcord before she can crash and drown in the boundless sea. “Detective, that…” Her jaw stiffens when the autumn leaves in Naz’s eyes begin to succumb to winter’s chill. “That would be inadvisable. I apologize. I have… Agency business to attend to.”

Naz pouts, lowering her gaze and nodding. “Right. Agency business…”

Ava doesn’t say a word. What could she even say? Should she apologize? Beg for forgiveness on her hands and knees? Kiss every single one of Naz’s manicured fingers and mumble her frantic regrets into her palm?

No. That won’t be necessary. The detective is a strong-willed and intelligent woman. She can take… rejection gracefully. It’s not exactly the first time Ava has pushed back her clumsy advances.

“Y’know what?” Naz looks up again, a forest fire burning into Ava’s eyes. “I shouldn’t have bothered. You’re just like everyone else. I was stupid to think that you could –” As quickly as it was ignited, the flame is extinguished. She interrupts herself with a click of her tongue and a sigh, turning around and pushing on the gate.

“That I could…?” Ava asks, her face passive, but her heart blaring the alarm so deafeningly that it nearly drowns out the sound of her own voice.

She scoffs. Her voice is softer now, yet even more heavy to bear. “Please, Commanding Agent du Mortain. This game we keep playing – it’s not fun for me anymore.” The bitterness sounds so out of place on her tongue, as though it were borrowed, and she was simply testing it out.

Ava wants to see her face like a dying person wants to be put out of their misery – and make no mistake, Ava du Mortain is dying in broad daylight on this crisp winter afternoon. The worst of it is, that although she knows that the words will rip her heart at the seams, that voice is sweet poison and she is prepared to drink until the very last drop – and even then, she’d hunger for more.

Her body is on autopilot, reaching for one of Naz’s bare sun-speckled shoulders to turn her around, only for Naz to jerk away as though she’d been burned. She turns a gaze weighed down with disappointment upon Ava.

“Don’t—”

Ava’s hand retracts to her side and she fumbles on her words. There are tears in Naz’s eyes now. _Tears_. And Ava put them there. If she could carve into her own chest and offer out her still-beating heart in apology, she would. If she could drag the sun itself out of the sky and carve into the burning rock a monument to everything that Naz is to her, she would. If she were capable of kissing her until she forgot how to cry, she would. But she can’t; the walls are too high – and that is by design.

“Don’t chip away at my heart in increments.” Naz sucks in a shuddering breath, stifling a sob, and the earth quivers beneath their feet. “It hurts, and it doesn’t stop hurting, because every time I think it’s over, you come back, and you chip off a little bit more. And I’m so tired of your shit.” There’s a whole beat where no words pass between them. “I’m exhausted.” She sounds so small now – a lonely chanteuse on a large stage with nobody in the audience but Ava, watching the show with that same infuriatingly unreadable expression on her face.

But these walls were very carefully built; Ava had memorized every brick, every crack, every imperfection – and behind those perfectly impenetrable walls, a civil war rages on. Words unspoken lie slain on the blood-soaked dirt, _her_ face – smiling, sobbing, sleeping, seething – is reflected on every fractured shard of glass, and Ava stands alone, digging her sword into the dirt. She’s breathless and wide-eyed. Her muscles are shivering in fatigue, barely holding her up.

Naz’s voice, quiet and broken, echoes within, causing the heart at the center of the fortress to spasm violently in response. And the knight, leaning against her sword, clutches at her chest in pain, coughing up blood.

“Naz, I –” Ava’s hand reaches out for her again, and then as an impulse, a precise and practiced move, it stops, hovering inches away from her skin.

Ava realizes she’s just made a mistake – another mistake – as she watches Naz’s foggy hazel eyes slide down at the gesture that had just been cut down before her. “Please don’t do this.” There’s none of the energy behind her voice that Ava is accustomed to hearing.

Ava is as a marble statue in an overgrown garden with vines climbing up her body, circling around her arms and ensnaring her fingers. And when Naz turns on her heel and passes through the gate, the rosy pink curls of her hair flutter upon the motion, caressing Ava’s still outstretched fingers. And when she drives away, Ava almost forgets to move, her eyes still fixed on the spot where she once stood.

She doesn’t know if it’s the buzz in her ears or the fog in her mind, but she doesn’t even notice Farah as she settles by her side. A small brown hand slides into the crook of Ava’s elbow, jolting her back to the present moment, and emerald meets amber in a conversation that doesn’t even need to be spoken aloud.

Farah’s head leans casually against Ava’s sturdy shoulder and she says, “Y’know, if you run, you can make it to her apartment before she gets there.”

“What do I even tell her?”

“The truth.”

_The truth?_ Ava shuts her eyes wearily. _What a concept._

Her eyes open again, and Ava’s hand makes its way to Farah’s shoulder in simple acknowledgement. When Farah blinks, the Commanding Agent is gone.

***

Naz takes more time than necessary to shut her car door, allowing herself to lean against the cool metal for a moment. Her shoulders feel like two boulders hanging from her neck. Maybe she shouldn’t have snapped at Ava… But loving Ava is like being pushed towards the ledge of a skyscraper rooftop. She’s already so far back that Ava’s face is a distant blur. The wind is whipping about her, her footing so unsteady that a rogue gust of wind could send her falling over the edge.

So yes, maybe she shouldn’t have snapped. Nonetheless she had to do it.

She sucks her lips into her teeth as she tries to calm herself down. Knowing her luck, the rest of Unit Bravo probably heard all that, too. Work is going to be _super_ awkward tomorrow for sure.

She feels colder than usual ascending the stairs of her building, like she’d left a little bit of her warmth back at the Agency warehouse. She tries not to think about the shell-shocked expression on Ava’s face when she’d gone, or how she had to fight the urge to stop the car and run back and bury herself in that heady scent that sends her spiraling through every happy place in her mind.

She almost mistakes the sight of Ava standing rigidly by the door with her hands behind her back for a figment of her desires conjured by an exhausted mind, but it doesn’t stop her heartbeat from picking up speed. The dam cracks, and through a gap in the stone, the ghost of a choked gasp passes through. With quaking fingers, she holds it together long enough to put the key into the lock and open the door.

All sense of purpose and direction lost, she ambles into her living room, and stands in the middle of the carpet like a puppet with cut strings. The soft click of her front door shutting is the only cue she needs to release her hold on the crumbling stone; a low wail follows.

She hears a soft gasp behind her, and in a voice that sounds far too scared to be Ava du Mortain, she hears someone say, “Naz, please look at me. Please.”

She wants to do it. She wants to look into Ava’s emerald eyes and see the promise of a future reflected back unto her. She wants to trace the lines of her face with her finger and feel those long golden eyelashes against her skin. She wants to carve a home into the crook of her neck. But Naz has lived in houses on fire from the day her father died up until the day she met Ava, and for the briefest of moments, the flames licking at her skin didn’t burn anymore – until they did, and the blisters returned with a vengeance. The only way she knows how to stay alive is to surround herself with ice. And, hell, it’s worked for her so far.

The fingertips that ghost over her shoulders timidly are cashmere, draped ever so lovingly over her shivering skeleton; and she lets it happen. Her body sighs and the sobs come more easily through her aching throat.

“I’m sorry, Ava,” she squeaks in between gasps. “I’m sorry I yelled at you. I’m sorry.”

The hands grow bolder, arms snaking across Naz’s torso until she’s completely anchored in place against Ava’s chest, and Ava’s face buried in her hair, inhaling her scent – vanilla with a hint of spice.

“You didn’t yell.” The lips Naz has caught herself daydreaming about on more than one occasion whisper against her temple like a kiss. “It’s okay. It’s all going to be okay.”

They stay like that for a while, Ava rocking the woman back and forth in her arms gently, with no sound but Naz’s crying sputtering and shuddering to a slow stop.

It is not one wall but two which met their end by battering ram that day. The siege which has been at a near standstill for so long has finally come to a head and it’s hard to see through the ash raining down upon them, the dust and iron in the air, and the rubble burying them alive. But if they die today, they die together.

“I love you.”

It’s the truth. The words slip through the cracks, drawn out like a bee to pollen.

Naz stiffens in Ava’s arms. She’d thought about those exact words being spoken in that exact order in Ava’s voice so many times that this feels like yet another one of those nights staring up at the ceiling running from sleep. Her hands reach up to grasp at the muscled forearms crossed over her chest, her fingertips warming at the realization that this is all real.

She fidgets in Ava’s grasp until they’re gazing at one another, their faces so close that Naz would scarcely have to move to capture Ava’s lips in a kiss. But she has different priorities at the moment.

“Say it again,” she says breathlessly. “Say it to my face.”

Ava’s hands rub up and down Naz’s shoulders, eyes taking her in like it’s the last time she’ll ever get to see her. Her face is tearstained and swollen, and her lips are the most kissable they’ve ever been – her lower lip hovering in a pout in a test of Ava’s willpower that nearly breaks her a second time.

And when Ava speaks again, she hangs on every word, inking them into Naz’s memory like a tattoo.

“I love you. I loved you before I even laid eyes on you. Before I even knew there was a you to love. I loved you like an infant loves air, unable to even comprehend yet why it needs to breathe. And I need you. I need you like the moon needs the sun to shine – I need you so much that it frightens me.”

Naz bites her lip, and Ava becomes acutely aware of the heart thudding rapidly within her human chest.

“How am I supposed to follow that?” Naz says, letting out a quiet breathy laugh. “That’s… completely unfair.”

Ava smirks. “I would love to see you try.”

Yet another laugh bubbles out of Naz and she hides her face in the soft cotton of Ava’s shirt. “Aw, jeez, Ava…”

The vampire’s arms loop around her shoulders again, pulling their bodies closer together. Ava wants to tell her that her laugh and that smile on her face are more breathtaking than Ava’s clumsy love declaration can express – that she’s already more than met Ava’s challenge just by existing.

When Naz’s face peeks out again, there’s a flush in the gaps between her freckles and a bashful smile playing at her lips. It is only then that Ava realizes that, for the first time ever, she’s managed to render her little songbird completely speechless.

“I love you, Ava,” she finally says, her cheeks tingling with heat. “Thank you for loving me, too.”

A smile widens across Ava’s face, and Naz catches the quickest glimpse of the dimples in her cheeks before she leans in to pull her lips into a kiss. It starts out hesitant, with Ava’s lips pulling away to hover uncertainly over the corner of Naz’s mouth.

Naz’s hand reaches around to undo the bun in Ava’s hair, letting the hair tie slip around her wrist before weaving her fingers into the loose blonde hair and pulling her in again, taking her time to savor the sweet flavor of Ava, mixed in with the saltiness of the tears that remains on her tongue. She wants to focus on the moment, but all she can do is think about that smile and how it made her heart swell three sizes larger and made her lungs forget how to breathe.

Ava’s hands wander to Naz’s face, her thumbs rubbing her cheeks to wipe the lingering moisture away. She gently pulls away, still close enough that their noses are touching. Naz lets out a dissatisfied whine, and Ava places a chaste kiss on the right side of her mouth in apology.

“A movie and popcorn then?” her voice mumbles, desire still sitting at the back of her throat, petulantly demanding she go back and devour those red lips again.

“Wh- Wha—” Naz’s mind has pushed all coherent thought out to create a home worthy of Ava.

She chuckles – a rare sound. “Earlier, you said you wanted us to watch a movie together.”

Walking herself through all the events that led up to this moment, Naz slowly says, “Yes… I think… I think I did.”

“I’ll prepare the popcorn then. And you pick the movie, alright?”

There are several content sighs stuck in Naz’s chest, each waiting their turn to escape – so she can only describe the near painful tightness in her chest as happiness. She nods. “Okay.” And before Ava can relinquish her grasp on her, she steps onto the tips of her toes and presses an innocent peck onto that devastatingly lovely smile.

They are achingly unwilling to let go of each other for fear that the dream will shatter, and they will be left alone again, and yet they do. With baby steps, they move to part. With great reluctance, their fingers separate. And with a touch of fear, they take their eyes off each other. And for once, with no loss of warmth.


End file.
